We’re already seeing how Microsoft Copilot can help turn “I can’t” into “watch me” for people around the world in their everyday lives. But for business leaders, Microsoft Copilot is just the start—there are so many additional ways you can bring this transformative technology into your organization. Understanding your options—and the business scenarios best suited for each—is critical. Read on to learn how you can approach making these decisions for your organization.

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Establish your business objectives

Before you think about how you’ll deploy AI solutions, you have to start with why. Aligning your AI investments with a clear business strategy is imperative, as my colleague Susan Etlinger explores in this blog post.

With specific goals in mind, you can prioritize use cases based on their potential for impact and scope your solution based on data and infrastructure requirements. This will help you make decisions aligned with your business objectives and drive your company forward.

Once you’ve identified your why, there are a few common pathways we’re seeing for how to apply AI to reach those goals—from buying off-the-shelf software as a service (SaaS) solutions to building a custom solution that meets your specific needs. Let’s explore the options.

Use Microsoft Copilot to boost employee productivity

If your priority is employee productivity across your business, Microsoft Copilot should be one of the first solutions you consider. If you’re already using Microsoft Entra for identity management, your employees can sign in using their work or school account and get commercial data protection for free—which means chat data isn’t saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data isn’t used to train the models.

Copilot helps your people to get the answers and time-saving assistance they need from powerful AI models without putting your company data at risk. But that’s just the start.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is our best Copilot experience for organizations. It gives you priority access to the very latest models—starting with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo. You get Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Microsoft Teams—combined with your universe of data in the Microsoft Graph, including data you bring in from external sources through Microsoft Graph connectors. Copilot for Microsoft 365 has enterprise-grade data protection, which means it inherits your existing Microsoft 365 security, privacy, identity, and compliance policies. It also includes Copilot Studio to customize Copilot for Microsoft 365 and build standalone copilots—more on this in a minute.

Built on Microsoft’s comprehensive approach to security, compliance, privacy, and responsible AI, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is designed to be enterprise-ready, helping employees in every part of your business unlock productivity and unleash creativity.

And with Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance, we’ve added role-specific workflow automation, guided actions, and content generation to the applications professionals use the most. With built-in integration across business systems—whether Dynamics 365 or a third-party customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or contact center applications—sellers, service agents, and financial professionals can be more effective and efficient as they work, guided by Copilot. 

When you’re thinking about boosting employee productivity in common business scenarios, an out-of-the-box solution like these can deliver incredible impact. But a solution like this may not be the right fit—so let’s look at the next pathway.

Customize Microsoft Copilot to serve the unique needs of your business

No two organizations are alike, and neither are the apps, data, and workflows that drive your business. Microsoft Copilot can help boost employee productivity in the usual functions of every business, but you may also need solutions customized for your own business processes. With Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low-code tool, you can tailor and extend Copilot for Microsoft 365 or build standalone copilots specific to your needs.

For example, within Copilot for Microsoft 365, you may be looking to add specific plugins to address nuanced topics like legal, finance, or human resources (HR). You may want to create and call new workflows within Copilot or connect Copilot with data that lives outside the Microsoft Graph. These customization capabilities are included with Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Create your own copilots to deliver transformational experiences

Now let’s take this a step further. Instead of building on the foundation of Microsoft Copilot, you may be looking to bring copilot experiences into your own applications with other data sources. The new copilot category is not limited to internal productivity and employee-facing applications, but can extend into external, customer-facing experiences that differentiate your business and drive growth.

With your customized copilot solution, you can bring generative AI to your own unique business processes like supply chain management, manufacturing line operations, or quality control. You can engage customers and users with more personalized experiences and recommendations. The potential for new innovation is limited only by your imagination—and with Microsoft’s range of development tools, you can build generative AI-powered experiences exactly where you want them.

To quickly and securely build your own copilots, you can start in a low-code environment with Copilot Studio, going beyond the extensibility capabilities we already covered. With Azure OpenAI Service behind the scenes, Copilot Studio is a fully managed, hosted SaaS service, with built-in analytics as well as security and governance controls. You also maintain control over dialog management and conversational orchestration, and you can deploy custom copilots built with Copilot Studio to many channels across web, apps, social channels, and Microsoft Teams.

You can also take your custom copilot a step further with a pro-code approach giving developers full control in an end-to-end application development platform—Azure AI Studio.

Azure AI Studio is a generative AI environment for developing intelligent applications from end-to-end, including custom copilots. For skilled development teams that need to benchmark models, mix and match models, fine tune, evaluate, and continuously monitor their solutions, this is the place. Azure AI Studio enables developers to build new AI applications or augment existing apps with AI capabilities. Developers can identify the best models for a custom copilot, create multimodal capabilities beyond text alone, design and evaluate prompts, build extensions with custom AI search, mitigate risk with robust content safety tools, deploy at scale, and continue to monitor applications in production.

Use the right tool—or tools—for the job

Though we’ve outlined a few different options for how you can use AI to help reach your business goals, these pathways are by no means mutually exclusive—you can and should use more than one approach to meet your needs. And with the Microsoft Cloud, you can easily work across approaches, and shift gears as your needs change.

You can start with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and use Copilot Studio to quickly build a workflow that serves a specific business function, then as you uncover more advanced applications for that workflow, Copilot Studio also works with Azure AI Studio and additional Azure services. This connected, end-to-end AI toolchain allows your developers to use the right tool for the job at hand, spanning low-code and pro-code capabilities as their needs change.

And keep in mind that AI safety and responsibility should be top of mind from the very beginning. Make sure you’re considering the principles, corporate standards, tools, and governance that you’ll need to ensure your AI experiences are built on trust. The Responsible AI Standard is a great place to start.

Next steps

I hope you take the time to explore the breadth of Microsoft’s AI innovation, and dig deeper into the various AI approaches I’ve outlined here. Remember—no matter what your business priorities, or where you’re starting from, Microsoft is ready to help empower your AI transformation.

The post Build, buy, or both? How to choose the right approach for your AI transformation appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

We recently commissioned a study through IDC and uncovered insights into how AI is driving business results and economic impact for organizations worldwide. More than 2,000 business leaders surveyed confirmed they’re already using AI for employee experiences, customer engagement, and to bend the curve on innovation.  

The study illustrates the business value of AI but it really comes to life through the stories of how our customers and partners are innovating today. Customers like Heineken, Thread, Moveworks, the National Basketball Association (NBA), and so many more are putting AI technologies to work for their businesses and their own customers and employees. 

From modern data solutions uniquely suited for the era of AI, beloved developer tools, and application services, we’re building Microsft Azure as the AI supercomputer for customers, no matter the starting point.

LEARN MOREMicrosoft Ignite 2023 chevron_right

This week at Ignite, the pace of innovation isn’t slowing down. We’ll share more stories about how organizations are turning to new solutions to drive their business forward. We’re also announcing many new capabilities and updates to make it easier than ever to use your favorite tools, maximize existing investments, save time, and innovate on Azure as a trusted platform.

Modern data solutions to power AI transformation

Every intelligent app starts with data—and your AI is only as good as your data—so a modern data and analytics platform is increasingly important. The integration of data and AI services and solutions can be a unique competitive advantage because every organization’s data is unique.

Last year, we introduced the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform as an integrated platform to bring together operational databases, analytics, and governance and enable you to integrate all your data assets seamlessly in a way that works for your business.

At Ignite this week, we are announcing the general availability of Microsoft Fabric, our most integrated data and AI solution yet, into the Intelligent Data Platform. Microsoft Fabric can empower you in ways that weren’t possible before with a unified data platform. This means you can bring AI directly to your data, no matter where it lives. This helps foster an AI-centered culture to scale the power of your data value creation so you can spend more time innovating and less time integrating.

EDP is a global energy company that aims to transform the world through renewable energy sources. They’re using Microsoft Fabric and OneLake to simplify data access across data storage, processing, visualization, and AI workflows. This allows them to fully embrace a data-driven culture where they have access to high-value insights and decisions are made with a comprehensive view of the data environment.

We’re also announcing Fabric as an open and extensible platform. We will showcase integrations with many of our partners like LSEG, Esri, Informatica, Teradata and SAS, who have been demonstrating the possibilities of bringing their product experiences as workloads into Fabric, widening their reach and breadth of capabilities.

Every organization is eager to save time and money as they transform. We’re announcing several new features and updates for Azure SQL that make Azure the ideal and most cost-effective place for your data. Updates include lower pricing for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale compute, Azure SQL Managed Instance free trial offer, and a wave of other new features. 

Lufthansa Technik AG has been running Azure SQL to support its application platform and data estate, leveraging fully managed capabilities to empower teams across functions. They’re joining on stage during a breakout session on cloud-scale databases, so you can learn more about their experience directly. 

Easily build, scale, and deploy multimodal generative AI experiences responsibly with Azure

The AI opportunity for businesses is centered on the incredible power of generative AI. We’re inspired by customers who are now nimbly infusing content generation capabilities to transform all kinds of apps into intuitive, contextual experiences that impress and captivate their own customers and employees.

Siemens Digital Industries is one company using Azure AI to enhance its manufacturing processes by enabling seamless communication on the shop floor. Their newest solution helps field engineers report issues in their native language, promoting inclusivity, efficient problem resolution, and faster response times. 

Today organizations need more comprehensive, unified tools to build for this next wave of generative AI-based applications. This is why we’re announcing new updates that push the boundaries of AI innovation and make it easier for customers to responsibly deploy AI at scale across their business.

Everything you need to build, test, and deploy AI innovations in one convenient location

At Ignite, we’re thrilled to introduce the public preview of Azure AI Studio, a groundbreaking platform for AI developers by Microsoft. Everything organizations need to tackle generative AI is now in one place: cutting-edge models, data integration for retrieval augmented generation (RAG), intelligent search capabilities, full-lifecycle model management, and content safety. 

We continue to expand choice and flexibility in generative AI models beyond Azure OpenAI Service. We announced the model catalog at Build and at Ignite, we’re announcing Model as a Service in managed API endpoint coming soon within the model catalog. This will enable pro developers to easily integrate new foundation models like Meta’s Llama 2, G42’s Jais, and Mistral’s premium models into their applications as an API endpoint and fine-tune models with custom training data, without having to manage the underlying GPU infrastructure. This functionality will help eliminate the complexity for our customers and partners of provisioning resources and managing hosting. 

Large language models (LLM) orchestration and grounding RAG are top of mind as momentum for LLM-based AI applications grows. Prompt flow, an orchestration tool to manage prompt orchestration and LLMOps, is now in preview in Azure AI Studio and generally available in Azure Machine Learning. Prompt flow provides a comprehensive solution that simplifies the process of prototyping, experimenting, iterating, and deploying your AI applications.

We’re also announcing at Ignite that Azure AI Search, formerly Azure Cognitive Search, is now available in Azure AI Studio so everything remains in one convenient location for developers to save time and boost productivity.

Azure AI Content Safety is also available in Azure AI Studio so developers can easily evaluate model responses all in one unified development platform. We’re also announcing the preview of new features inside Azure AI Studio powered by Azure AI Content Safety to address harms and security risks that are introduced by large language models. The new features help identify and prevent attempted unauthorized modifications, and identify when large language models generate material that leverages third-party intellectual property and content. 

With Azure AI Content Safety, developers can monitor human and AI-generated content across languages and modalities and streamline workflows with customizable severity levels and built-in blocklists.

It’s great to see customers already leveraging this to build their AI solutions. In just six months, Perplexity brought Perplexity Ask, a conversational answer engine, to market with Azure AI Studio. They were able to streamline and expedite AI development, get to market faster, scale quickly to support millions of users, and cost-effectively deliver security and reliability.

If you’re creating a custom copilot, improving search, enhancing call centers, developing bots, or a blend of all of this, Azure AI Studio offers everything you need. You can check out Eric Boyd’s blog to learn more about Azure AI Studio.

Generative AI is now multi-modal

We are excited to enable a new chapter in the generative AI journey for our customers with GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, in preview, coming soon to the Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Studio. With GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, developers can deliver multi-modal capabilities in their applications. 

We are adding several new updates to Azure AI Vision. GPT-4 Turbo with Vision in combination with our Azure AI Vision service can see, understand, and make inferences like video analysis or video Q&A from visual inputs and associated text-based prompt instructions.

In addition to GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, we are happy to share other new innovations to Azure OpenAI Service including GPT-4 Turbo in preview and GPT-3.5 Turbo 16K 1106 in general availability coming at the end of November and image model DALL-E 3 in preview now.

Search in the era of AI

Effective retrieval techniques, like those powered by search, can improve the quality of responses and response latency. A common practice for knowledge retrieval (retrieval step in RAG), is to use vector search. Search can power effective retrieval techniques to vastly improve the quality of responses and reduce latency, which is essential for generative AI apps as they must be grounded on content from data, or websites, to augment responses generated by LLMs. 

Azure AI Search is a robust information retrieval and search platform that enables organizations to use their own data to deliver hyper-personalized experiences in generative AI applications. We’re announcing the general availability of vector search for fast, highly relevant results from data.

Vector search is a method of searching for information within various data types, including images, audio, text, video, and more. It’s one of the most critical elements of AI-powered, intelligent apps, and the addition of this capability is our latest AI-ready functionality to come to our Azure databases portfolio.

Semantic ranker, formerly known as semantic search, is also generally available and provides access to the same machine learning-powered search re-ranking technology used to power Bing. Your generative AI applications can deliver the highest quality responses to every user Q&A with a feature-rich vector database integrated with state-of-the-art relevance technology.

Accelerate your AI journey responsibly and with confidence

At Microsoft, we’re committed to safe and responsible AI. It goes beyond ethical values and foundational principles, which are critically important. We’re integrating this into the products, services, and tools we release so organizations can build on a foundation of security, risk management, and trust. 

We are pleased to announce new updates at Ignite to help customers pursue AI responsibly and with confidence.

Setting the standard for responsible AI innovation—expanding our Copilot Copyright Commitment

Microsoft has set the standard with services and tools like Azure AI Content Safety, the Responsible AI Dashboard, model monitoring, and our industry-leading commitment to defend and indemnify commercial customers from lawsuits for copyright infringement.   

Today, we are announcing the expansion of the Copilot Copyright Commitment, now called Customer Copyright Commitment (CCC), to customers using Azure OpenAI Service. As more customers build with generative AI inside their organizations, they are inspired by the potential of this technology and are eager to commercialize it externally.   

By extending the CCC to Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft is broadening our commitment to defend our commercial customers and pay for any adverse judgments if they are sued for copyright infringement for using the outputs generated by Azure OpenAI Service. This benefit will be available starting December 1, 2023. 

 As part of this expansion, we’ve published new documentation to help Azure OpenAI Service customers implement technical measures and other best practices to mitigate the risk of infringing content. Customers will need to comply with the documentation to take advantage of the benefit. Azure OpenAI Service is a developer service and comes with a shared commitment to build responsibly.  We look forward to customers leveraging it as they build their own copilots. 

Announcing the Azure AI Advantage offer

We want to be your trusted partner as you deliver next-gen, transformative experiences with pioneering AI technology, a deeply integrated platform, and leading cloud security.  

Azure offers a full, integrated stack purpose-built for cloud-native, AI-powered applications, accelerating your time to market and giving you a competitive edge and superior performance. ​To help on that journey we are happy to introduce a new offer to help new and existing Azure AI and GitHub Copilot customers realize the value of Azure AI and Azure Cosmos DB together and get on the fast track to developing AI powered applications. You can learn more about the Azure AI Advantage offer and register here. 

Azure Cosmos DB and Azure AI combined deliver many benefits, including enhanced reliability of generative AI applications through the speed of Azure Cosmos DB, a world-class infrastructure and security platform to grow your business while safeguarding your data, and provisioned throughput to scale seamlessly as your application grows.

Azure AI services and GitHub Copilot customers deploying their AI apps to Azure Kubernetes Service may be eligible for additional discounts. Speak to your Microsoft representative to learn more. 

Empowering all developers with AI powered tools

There is so much in store this week at Ignite to improve the developer experience, save time, and increase productivity as they build intelligent applications. Let’s dive into what’s new.

Updates for Azure Cosmos DB—the database for the era of AI

For developers to deliver apps more efficiently and with reduced production costs, at Ignite we’re sharing new features in Azure Cosmos DB.

Now in preview, dynamic scaling provides developers new flexibility to scale databases up or down and brings cost savings to customers, especially those with operations around the globe. We’re also bringing AI deeper into the developer experience and increasing productivity with the preview of Microsoft Copilot for Azure enabling natural language queries in Azure Cosmos DB.  

Bond Brand Loyalty turned to Azure Cosmos DB to scale to more than two petabytes of transaction data while maintaining security and privacy for their own customers. On Azure, Bond built a modern offering to support extensive security configurations, reducing onboarding time for new clients by 20 percent.

We’re announcing two exciting updates to enable developers to build intelligent apps: general availability of both Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore and vector search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore.

Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore allows developers to build intelligent applications with full support for MongoDB data stored in Azure Cosmos DB, which unlocks opportunities for app development thanks to deep integration with other Azure services. That means developers can enjoy the benefits of native Azure integrations, low total cost of ownership (TCO), and a familiar vCore architecture when migrating existing applications or building new ones. 

Vector search in Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB vCore allows developers to seamlessly integrate data stored in Azure Cosmos DB into AI-powered applications, including those using Azure OpenAI Service embeddings. Built-in vector search enables you to efficiently store, index, and query high-dimensional vector data, and eliminates the need to transfer the data outside of your Azure Cosmos DB database.

PostgreSQL developers have used built-in vector search in Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL since this summer. Now, they can take advantage of the public preview of Azure AI extension in Azure Database for PostgreSQL to build LLMs and rich generative AI solutions.

KPMG Australia used the vector search capability when they turned to Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Cosmos DB to build their own copilot application. The KymChat app has helped employees speed up productivity and streamline operations. The solution is also being made available to KPMG customers through an accelerator that combines KymChat’s use cases, features, and lessons learned, helping customers accelerate their AI journey.

Building cloud-native and intelligent applications

Intelligent applications combine the power of AI and cloud-scale data with cloud-native app development to create highly differentiated digital experiences. The synergy between cloud-native technologies and AI is a tangible opportunity for evolving traditional applications, making them intelligent, and delivering more value to end users. We’re dedicated to continually enhancing Azure Kubernetes Service to meet these evolving demands of AI for customers who are just getting started as well as those who are more advanced.

Customers can now run specialized machine learning workloads like LLMs on Azure Kubernetes Service more cost-effectively and with less manual configuration. The Kubernetes AI toolchain Operator automates LLMs deployment on AKS across available CPU and GPU resources by selecting optimally sized infrastructure for the model. It makes it possible to easily split inferencing across multiple lower-GPU-count virtural machines (VMs) thus increasing the number of Azure regions where workloads can run, eliminating wait times for higher GPU-count VMs, and lowering overall cost. Customers can also run preset models from the open source hosted on AKS, significantly reducing costs and overall inference service setup time while eliminating the need for teams to be experts on available infrastructure. 

Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager is now generally available and enables multi-cluster and at-scale scenarios for Azure Kubernetes Service clusters. Fleet manager provides a global scale for admins to manage workload distribution across clusters and facilitate platform and application updates so developers can rest assured they are running on the latest and most secure software. 

We’ve also been sharing learnings about how to help engineering organizations enable their own developers to get started and be productive quickly, while still ensuring systems are secure, compliant, and cost-controlled. Microsoft is providing a core set of technology building blocks and learning modules to help organizations get started on their journey to establish a platform engineering practice. 

New Microsoft Dev Box capabilities to improve the developer experience

Maintaining a developer workstation that can build, run, and debug your application is critical to keeping up with the pace of modern development teams. Microsoft Dev Box provides developers with secure, ready-to-code developer workstations for hybrid teams of any size. 

We’re introducing new preview capabilities to give development teams more granular control over their images, the ability to connect to Hosted Networks to simplify connecting to your resources securely, and templates to make it easier to get up and running. Paired with new capabilities coming to Azure Deployment Environments, it’s easier than ever to deploy those projects to Azure.

Build upon a reliable and scalable foundation with .NET 8

.NET 8 is a big leap forward towards making .NET one of the best platforms to build intelligent cloud-native applications, with the first preview of .NET Aspire – an opinionated cloud ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed cloud native applications. It includes curated components for cloud-native fundamentals including telemetry, resilience, configuration, and health checks. The stack makes it easier to discover, acquire, and configure essential dependencies for cloud-native applications on day 1 and day 100. 

.NET 8 is also the fastest version of .NET ever, with developer productivity enhancements across the stack – whether you are building for cloud, a full stack web app, a desktop or mobile app suing .NET MAUI, or integrating AI to build the next copilot for your app. These are available in Visual Studio, which also releases today.  

Azure Functions and Azure App Service have full support for .NET 8 both in Linux and Windows, and both Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Apps also support .NET 8 today.  

There are no limits to your innovation potential with Azure

There’s so much rolling out this week with data, AI, and digital applications so I hope you’ll tune into the virtual Ignite experience and hear about the full slate of announcements and more about how you can put Azure to work for your business. 

This week’s announcements are proof of our commitment to helping customers take that next step of innovation and stay future-ready. I can’t wait to see how your creativity and new innovations unfold for your business. 

You can check out these resources to learn more about everything shared today. We hope you have a great Ignite week!

• Attend these sessions to learn more about how Azure can help you, no matter the starting point:
  • Keynote session with Scott Guthrie and friends: AI transformation for your organization with the Microsoft Cloud 
  • Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks 
  • Build ISV apps with Microsoft Fabric in the Intelligent Data Platform 
  • AI and Kubernetes: A winning combination for Modern App Development 
  • Build your own Copilot with Azure AI Studio
  • What’s new in generative AI? 
  • Vector search and state of the art retrieval for Generative AI apps
  • Master Platform Engineering: Architecting Scalable and Resilient Systems 
• Explore all the Microsoft Azure announcements in the Book of News.
• Learn how Microsoft Azure delivers purpose-built cloud infrastructure in the era of AI
• Explore Microsoft’s Responsible AI playbook to learn more about our approach, what we learned, and how it can apply to your business. 
• Learn more about Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate and how they can help you from migration to AI innovation. 
• Get ready for what’s next by visiting the AI Learning and Community Hub on Microsoft Learn with AI skilling opportunities on Microsoft Learn.

The post Microsoft Azure AI, data, and application innovations help turn your AI ambitions into reality appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

New models: GPT-4 Turbo on Azure OpenAI Service

We are very enthusiastic about all the new models introduced, including GPT-3.5 Turbo, and updates to models including DALL-E 3, and Whisper 3. Among them, the eagerly awaited GPT-4 Turbo offers lower pricing, extended prompt length, and structured JSON formatting with improved efficiency and control. We’re looking forward to making these great Turbo models available on Azure OpenAI Service by the end of this year in keeping with our standard practice of bringing new model innovation from our partners at OpenAI to the Azure OpenAI Service.

Increasing access for all AI Builders

OpenAI’s announcement of lower pricing is significant. It will make the models more accessible and increase their utilization, allowing a broader range of applications to harness their power and ushering in a new era of generative AI. On Azure OpenAI Service, token pricing for the new models will be at parity with OpenAI’s prices.

And in an exciting development, Microsoft made GitHub Enterprise available to all DevDay conference in-person attendees to use for free for 90 days. GitHub Enterprise is a powerful tool for developers, assisting in code completion and development. Its integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem aligns with the mission of helping developers easily bring ideas to life on Azure.

GPTs: New ways to create and monetize

GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful in their daily life, at specific tasks, at work, or at home—and then share that creation with others. No coding is required. You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone. Just like with plug-ins, we are looking forward to building deep ecosystem support for GPTs, which we’ll share more on next week at our Microsoft Ignite conference.

Microsoft and OpenAI partnership

OpenAI’s introduction of a Custom Models program will be of particular interest to enterprises, and Microsoft will continue to offer the convenience of integrating OpenAI’s services seamlessly within Microsoft’s existing ecosystem and support infrastructure, providing a comprehensive solution for all enterprise needs.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, echoed the sentiment of a strong and productive partnership with Microsoft. “I think we have the best partnership in tech,” Altman told Nadella onstage.

Nadella went on to talk about the companies’ alignment. “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And to me, ultimately, AI is only going to be useful if it truly does empower…it’s about being able to get the benefits of AI broadly disseminated to everyone,” Nadella said.

With these announcements, developers and enterprises are now poised to explore new horizons, empowered by the combined strengths of Microsoft and OpenAI, and the limitless possibilities of generative AI.

Get started with Azure OpenAI Service today

• Apply now for access to Azure OpenAI Service. 
• Review the new documentation for Azure OpenAI Service.
• Explore the playground and customization in Azure AI Studio.
• Learn more about Data, Privacy, and Security for Azure OpenAI Service.
• Bookmark the What’s New page.

The post Come build with us: Microsoft and OpenAI partnership unveils new AI opportunities appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

And this transformation is not just a vision for the future. AI is demonstrating real business value and economic impact for our customers today. In fact, companies have reported significant benefits from using Microsoft AI. Things like cost savings, optimized processes, reduced emissions, and personalized customer experiences.

As every company and organization looks to lead in the new era of AI, we believe there are four imperatives that define business success: customer engagement through AI, AI-empowered employee experiences, reshaping business processes, and bending the curve on innovation.

There are so many examples of organizations across industries turning to AI to launch innovative products, accelerate development time, reimagine data and AI at scale, and transform their work culture. Today I’d like to share how a few are using the power of the Microsoft Cloud and AI technologies to achieve all of this.

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Reinventing customer engagement

Customer loyalty is key to any business’s success, and there’s persistent pressure to personalize and improve the experience people have with brands they love. This is especially true in media and entertainment, for example, as companies are always looking for ways to better connect with their audience and grow market share.

More fans are turning to digital content to connect with the game and the National Basketball Association (NBA) wanted to grow its fan base with a highly customized and comprehensive experience.

“At the NBA, we’ve partnered with Microsoft to revolutionize the fan experience. Through the power of Microsoft’s cloud and AI technologies, we are able to harness the potential of our vast array of data sources and extensive historical video archive,” said Melissa Brenner, NBA Executive Vice President, Digital Media. “This has enabled us to create more personalized and tailored fan experiences, helping drive a 50 percent growth in NBA League Pass subscribers and tripling NBA App content video views from the previous season.”

Enriching employee experiences

While delivering engaging customer experiences is a critical business outcome, there’s another audience that’s just as important: the employees who serve those customers. And AI can create better experiences and empower the employees doing the work behind the scenes.

More and more, enterprise leaders want to help their employees with automated processes, the advantages of conversational AI, and even creative work. Moveworks is filling this need with a conversational AI platform that accurately interprets what employees require, regardless of how they phrase it—and delivers quick, customized responses that reduce interruptions to work.

Thread is on a mission to make it easier for IT technicians to communicate with customers. They used Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to help automate time-draining tasks and developed a new tool that utilizes generative AI models to streamline service requests. With these solutions, Thread helped free up IT service providers to focus on what matters most—delivering incredible service to customers.

Reshaping business processes

Many companies have already built systems that address certain issues for certain functions over time, but they end up with isolated pieces of useful information that can be hard to access and combine. AI can reveal integrated insights that help anticipate and speed up the information teams need by finding and making the right connections.

Heineken has a vision to be the best-connected brewer, and it is always looking for ways technology can help its mission. They’ve been exploring AI to help update their business processes and are now developing internal chatbots to help connect employees with corporate resources, help executives access meaningful financial data, and help employees manage equipment across their supply chain. Heineken is discovering that using AI efficiently can save employee time and mental energy to deal with more significant and creative business problems. 

“Fast fashion” is a term used to describe the mass manufacturing of runway styles quickly and cheaply. However, today’s consumers are increasingly concerned with sustainability and often make their purchasing decisions accordingly. So fashion designers need to find a way to meet demand while reducing waste. I love the story of Fashable, a fashion company based in Portugal. They faced challenges of unsustainable production, excess inventory, and long production cycles. With the help of Microsoft AI, they developed an algorithm to create original clothing designs, helping match customer demand, accelerate market entry, and reduce clothing waste.

Bending the curve on innovation

Companies in every industry are eager to gain any kind of edge to stay ahead of competition. In the financial services industry, we’ve seen that one of the biggest opportunities is data: delivering the right data at the right time, while reducing complexity and increasing flexibility.

As part of our 10-year strategic partnership, Microsoft and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) are reshaping the future of global finance. Sophisticated analytics and advanced modeling are now a critical success factor for any customer making strategic business decisions – and data is the most meaningful factor in that equation. LSEG is working with Microsoft to bring together our horizontal software capabilities with their industry-specific financial market infrastructure, data, and analytics, enabling customers to realize increased value, faster, with streamlined workflows tailored specifically to their needs. And with this data foundation, LSEG can deliver AI-powered solutions that are even more valuable for financial services organizations – generating insights that are reliable, trusted, and relevant to the task at hand.

Accelerate your AI journey responsibly

It’s clear that AI is transforming every industry and creating new possibilities and challenges for businesses of all sizes. Whether you want to improve your operations, enrich your customer experience, or foster innovation in products, services, or business models, AI can help you reach your objectives and keep you competitive. To thrive with AI, you need a clear vision, a solid strategy, and a reliable partner.

At Microsoft, we’re committed to the progress of AI guided by ethical values and believe AI systems should be responsible by design. We believe AI must be built on a foundation of security, risk management, and trust. We documented our own journey of creating AI principles, tools and best practices and shared our Responsible AI Standard playbook as a resource every customer can use to build their own Responsible AI practices, policies, and processes. Every organization has unique needs and challenges they’re looking to address with AI, and resources like the Responsible AI Standard can help you accelerate your journey.

So, how could AI help your organization? How can you save time, create better experiences, or realize new insights for your business? 

As a first step, we suggest you explore the five pillars of AI success, where you can find out how to plan and implement a successful AI strategy based on insights and best practices.

Next, build your AI skills and capabilities with this learning path, which provides business leaders with the information and tools to implement AI in their organizations. It covers how to plan, strategize, and grow AI projects in an ethical manner, so it’s a great resource.

Beyond the insights and all the stories shared here, you can also check out the Official Microsoft Blog for more information on the business opportunity of AI. The blog discusses how AI can help organizations drive economic value and solve their challenges.

We’re here to support you in your AI innovation with resources, guidance, and tools. Now the only question is, are you prepared to accelerate your AI journey?

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